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My alcohol is my alcohol; your alcohol is your alcohol. When I am talking about alcohol, I am not talking about your alcohol. I am talking about the alcohol of Buddhas. Yes, they are drunk — drunk with the Divine. ~ Osho

Intoxicants will disappear from the world only when meditation has become a world-wide phenomenon, when each single individual has created some meditativeness in his being; when each single individual has become aware, “There is no need to be miserable. Misery is created by me. Life is not misery: life’s nature is bliss. It is my stupidity that I am creating misery out of it.” Misery needs great efforts, bliss is natural — you cannot create bliss, you can only create misery. And if you don’t create misery, bliss comes of its own accord. Bliss comes effortlessly — you cannot practise it. But for misery you have to make great efforts — and you ARE making great efforts to remain miserable. You have invested much in your misery.

Why in the first place do you run after spurious pleasures? This woman, that man… why do you run after spurious pleasures? What is the rationale behind it? The rationale is that you are already in sorrow. You want somehow to forget all about it; you want to drown yourself in alcohol, in sex, in money, in power politics — you want somewhere to drown yourself.

The person who is interested in alcohol must be living in misery, in a kind of suffering. That’s why he wants somehow to forget it all. Alcohol is nothing but a chemical strategy to forget your miseries, anxieties, your problems, to forget yourself.

The appeal of wine is really because you are so egoistic. You are too burdened by it and sometimes you want to forget it. So the world will have to follow alcohol or Tao — these are the alternatives. Only a religious man, a really religious man, can be beyond alcohol, marijuana, lsd — any type of drug. Only a religious man can be beyond them; otherwise how can you be beyond them? The ego is too much, the burden is too much, it is constantly on your head. You HAVE to forget yourselves. But if wine can do so much, you cannot conceive of what the divine wine can do. What is the wine doing? For certain moments, through chemical changes in the brain, in the body, you forget yourself. But this is momentary. Deep down you are there, and after a few hours the chemical effect is gone, your body has thrown the wine out and the ego asserts itself again. But there is a wine, I tell you — God is that wine, Tao, or whatsoever name you like to call it. Once you taste it, the ego is gone forever. Nobody ever comes back from that drunkenness. That is why Sufis always talk of wine, Sufis always talk of women. Their woman is not the woman you know — God is the woman. And their wine is not the wine that you know — God is the wine.

When you are too worried, too tense and you take to alcohol. Yes, for a few hours you will forget all your worries and all your tensions, but the alcohol cannot take your worries away forever; it cannot solve them. And while you are drowned in alcohol those worries are growing, becoming stronger; you are giving them time to grow. And when you are back the next morning with a hangover and a headache added to the worries, you will be surprised; they are bigger than when you had left them. Then it becomes a pattern of life: become again and again intoxicated so you can forget — but again and again you have to face your life. This is not an intelligent way to live. I am against all intoxicants, against all drugs. They don’t help; they only help you to postpone problems. I would like to really solve your problems. I have solved mine, and the problems are the same, more or less.

Your dreams are like intoxicants. You can drink alcohol, but how long can you remain in it? Tomorrow you will be back, and all the worries and all the anxieties will be back, and you were trying to escape from them. There is no escape, there is only understanding which helps. Escape does not help at all; your troubles will go on increasing

Pleasure is escape. That’s why pleasure is not worth it. In fact it is not pleasure, it is a sort of suicide. You escape from the problems, you put your back to the problems, but this is no way to solve them. You will have to come back, because once you have become conscious, unconsciousness cannot be a permanent state of affairs. You can have a dive into unconsciousness, but how long can you remain underwater? For a second — and then you are back again to the surface. You cannot remain unconscious for long. Alcohol or drugs or sex or anything in which you become unconscious, in which you lose for a moment all your worries, forget about them — it is a forgetfulness, but forgetfulness cannot be a permanent state. So this is not helping in any way, pleasure doesn’t help. You have to come back again and again — and then it becomes a vicious circle. When you come back and you find the anguish is waiting, the anxiety, all the problems — rather, they have increased — you become afraid, you become nervous. Your whole being trembles and becomes fear; then you have to escape again and again. The more you escape, the more problems increase. The more problems you face, the more alcohol is needed. And then the quantity of the intoxicant has to be increased continuously because you become attuned to it. You take a certain quantity of a drug: the first day you feel unconscious. After a few days you are not unconscious; you are still conscious, worries are still there knocking at the door, you can hear — you need a greater quantity. The greater quantity will also become less.

All the cultures, all the religions have been condemning alcohol, opium, hashish, marijuana — but their condemnation seems to have no effect. Humanity goes on taking drugs, and nobody bothers to ask, if so many wise people are against it, why are people taking these drugs? And the strange thing is that so many of these wise people who are against it are taking drugs themselves — perhaps in different ways. In one country, marijuana may be illegal, hashish may be illegal, LSD may be illegal, but alcohol is not. And alcohol is more dangerous than any of the other three. Why isn’t alcohol illegal? — because Jesus used to drink it. Christianity cannot make it illegal; otherwise Jesus would be proved a criminal — and not an ordinary criminal, because he was even making water into alcohol. And the countries who have tried…. For example, India, which is not a Christian country, has tried hard to prohibit alcohol, but has failed. Prohibition makes things even worse. People start making alcohol on their own, in their own homes. And thousands of people have died from poisoning because they don’t know what they are drinking. It is being sold underground, and they don’t know how it is being prepared. And finally those prohibitions have to be withdrawn. One thing that I want to make clear to you is that all the people who have been against the laws and governments and religions and who are still going for drugs have a certain argument. And that is that they want their personality to be forgotten. Their person is so painful, so ugly, that they are ready to commit any illegal act, just to forget it for a few hours. The influence of intoxicating drugs proves only one thing: man, in his ordinary personality, is living in despair. He wants for a few hours at least to forget all about the worries and the problems and the anxieties, and there seems to be no other way. What do you want to protect your person for? Your person is your problem. And if you are intelligent enough, and you can find some presence where your person starts melting and disappearing — without any intoxication, without any drugs — then can you conceive of a greater blessing? Let the person disappear; it is simply a burden, a torture, a pain in the neck for which there is no medicine.

If you want people not to drink, you have to give them something higher that takes away their anxieties. They drink because they are tense, they drink because there is anxiety, they drink because they want to forget. They want to forget the wife, they want to forget the husband, they want to forget the small kids, they want to forget their business, they want to forget their financial troubles. Unless you give them a higher consciousness which can solve these problems — then there is no need to forget anything — unless you give them such a deep alertness and awareness that they can see the root cause of their misery, and they don’t want just to cover it with alcohol but want to cut it from the roots… Except meditation there is no way that intoxicant drugs can be prohibited.

Meditation is real spiritual alcohol! It takes you to such deep blissfulness… you don’t have to forget your blissfulness. Do you want to forget your blissfulness? Alcohol only helps you to forget. Whether it is anxiety or ecstasy, whether it is tension or relaxation, it simply helps you to forget. Once you are blissful, happy, once you don’t have any tensions, you will not drink because the drink will simply destroy your blissfulness, your joy, your dance, your song. Give people some new spiritual awakening.

My alcohol is my alcohol; your alcohol is your alcohol. When I am talking about alcohol, I am not talking about your alcohol. I am talking about the alcohol of Buddhas. Yes, they are drunk — drunk with the Divine.

Alcohol can disturb before enlightenment, because it can make you more unconscious — that’s its whole purpose. Your consciousness is burdened so much with anxieties, worries, anguish, that you take a drink and feel good because your consciousness goes to sleep. Hence, before enlightenment, any kind of intoxicant is absolutely to be dropped. It affects your consciousness and drags it downwards towards darker realms of unconsciousness. And the whole effort of the seeker is to pull the darker parts out into the light, so this is just the reverse process. But after enlightenment you are free. There is no problem; now no intoxicant can make your consciousness drop from the height it has reached. You can enjoy intoxicants if you like, there is no danger. But ordinarily, all the enlightened people in the past have not used intoxicants after their enlightenment.

So I want to tell you that after enlightenment one can drink any alcoholic beverage. But there is no need, because the enlightened one has no tensions, no anxiety. He has nothing to drown in alcohol, so there is no need for him. But just to be a good companion to you, he can drink a little bit once in a while. That will keep him more human, and that will give you more hope! It will destroy the distance between the enlightened and the unenlightened. And that is my greatest effort — to destroy any distance between the enlightened and the unenlightened.

Gurdjieff could not attract many disciples in the West. The reason was, he was not an articulate person. He knew only the Caucasian language. He was born, strangely, in the same place where Joseph Stalin was born. They both learned in the same seminary, they were colleagues when they were small children. And both had the same quality of steel. Joseph Stalin proved his steel, and in the same way but in a different direction, George Gurdjieff also proved his steel. He was perhaps the strongest man you can imagine, stronger than Stalin, because Gurdjieff had no power; his power was inner. You could give him as much alcohol as possible, and you could not make him drunk — that was his power — no drug had any effect on him, his witnessing was so great. He would go on moving behind the alcohol, the alcohol would not be able to distract his witnessing.

My methods are different from George Gurdjieff’s. I am not in favor of any alcoholic beverages. I am not in favor of any psychedelic drugs either, because they all create illusory worlds for you and they all are distractions. They make you more and more oblivious of your own being, unaware of your own self. My work is based in awareness. The word ‘awareness’ is the golden key here, the master key. You have to learn to be more aware. Howsoever painful it is in the beginning, be more aware, because it is by becoming more aware that one day you will become part of the celebration of the whole.

When you see a drunkard coming home in the late night, you cannot believe how he manages. He has lost all control and all balance because alcohol affects the sixth sense. Every drug affects the sixth sense and immediately you lose balance.

Just the other day somebody had asked a question: “Jesus used to drink alcohol. What do you say about it?” I can allow Jesus! He was so conscious that he could afford to drink once in a while. But I cannot allow you. You are already so unconscious, you are already so burdened; now, making you more unconscious will be dragging you towards hell. In the East, particularly in India, there has existed a tremendously beautiful esoteric school of tantrikas. One of their very secret methods is that whenever a master thinks that a disciple is ready, he allows him to drink alcohol or take some other drug in small portions, in small quantities, slowly. As his meditation deepens he is allowed to drink bigger amounts. The only condition to be fulfilled is that he should remain conscious. Even under the influence of the drug he should remain conscious — that is the only condition to be fulfilled. This is a rare experiment! And a moment comes when a real meditator can drink as much… he can drink alcohol just like water and he will remain as centered as ever, as conscious as ever. That is the crucial test. That day the master says, “Now there is no need to drink at all. You passed through the test.”

In the East there has been a secret tradition of tantrikas who go on practicing meditation — and side by side they go on taking drugs in greater and greater amounts for a certain reason. They are not interested in drugs, they are interested in meditation. But they go on increasing the amount of the drug slowly slowly, so that they can remain alert with the drug. It takes a long time, it is a very subtle process of awakening. In the hands of the fools it will be destructive, it will be suicidal. Hence it is a sacred tradition. Only the master gives it to the disciple — and very rarely. If he finds some disciple of such integrity, then only does he give this process: “Meditate and go on increasing the amount of the drug so slowly that it never overpowers you and your watchfulness remains intact.” But the drug will start removing all rocks and it will bring up all that you have repressed down the ages in your many lives. Watching it you will be allowing it to disappear. That is the magic of watching. If you watch something, either it is going to disappear totally from your being, or it is going to be dissolved into your being. If it is something natural, spontaneous, it will be dissolved into your being. That too is beautiful. If it is something not part of your being, extraneous — has come from the outside, is a parasite on you — it will evaporate.

You are truer when you have drunk a little too much, and things start surfacing from your unconscious. Under the influence of alcohol you are truer than you ordinarily are, because the alcohol relaxes the guard. Then you start saying things you always wanted to say, and you are not worried about anything, and you are not trying to leave any impression — you are simply being true. Drunkards are beautiful persons: truer, more authentic. It is ironical that only drunkards are authentic.

Pleasure is when you forget your misery. Misery remains — you forget your misery. You go to the movie, you become so much focused on the movie, you become so much involved in the story, that you forget yourself, that for two, three hours you are as if you are not. But outside the movie house you are back to your routine self and to your routine misery. The stupidity is that because of your unconsciousness you suffer, and when you want to avoid your suffering you drink alcohol so that you can forget your suffering. It is because of unconsciousness that you are miserable; then you try to become more unconscious so that you need not know that you are miserable. This way you go on deeper and deeper into the unconscious.

Perhaps for a few moments you can drown it in alcohol, but the next morning it will come back, worse than it was before. Then you call it a hangover. You suffer the hangover; still again you are going to drink, knowing perfectly well that the hangover is coming.

Your whole life is your choice: you can be in hell, you can be in heaven. And heaven and hell are not far away from each other. In fact, there is not even a fence between the two, there is no division; they merge and melt into each other. You can easily move from one space to the other. And people have tried all kinds of things, but nothing succeeds. People have tried alcohol and drugs and people have tried prayers, religious rituals — nothing works. Maybe for a moment, or for a few hours, mescaline or LSD can take you away from your present misery, but in fact they don’t take you away — they simply make you unaware of it. Only one thing has been successful and that is becoming more conscious, accepting that it is your responsibility; if you are in misery, then looking at it and finding out how you have chosen it and why you have chosen it. And seeing that it is your choice is enough.

A man who lives consciously is so drunk with the sheer joy of breathing, with the sheer joy of being, with the joy of the birds singing and the sun rising in the morning… he is so drunk with existence that he needs no other drug — alcohol, LSD, mescaline or marijuana. He needs nothing! He is always in a psychedelic ecstasy, and that ecstasy is something his inner being releases; it is his own fragrance. Not only is he drunk — whosoever comes to him, stays with him, becomes drunk with his being. I am a drunkard! If you allow yourself to be here and available to me, you are bound to become drunkards.

Ego is very intoxicating, remember it. It is more alcoholic than any alcohol can be. And it is pious; when it is pretending to be holy it is very pious — and a pious poison is the purest poison. Avoid it. Come back to the earth. Be simple and see the reality as it is.

In India, we have experienced everything in these thousands of years. There are monks in India who can drink any amount of alcohol and it does not affect them, any amount of marijuana and it does not affect them at all, they remain just simply the same. The only thing that in the end they have to try when nothing else affects them is a cobra snake bite. So they keep cobra snakes with them. On their tongue they will take a bite by the cobra which can kill you — but to them it just gives a little…. What drugs give to you, only cobra poison can give them — and sooner or later they become accustomed to it.

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4 thoughts on “My alcohol is my alcohol; your alcohol is your alcohol. When I am talking about alcohol, I am not talking about your alcohol. I am talking about the alcohol of Buddhas. Yes, they are drunk — drunk with the Divine. ~ Osho”

Very nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to
say that I have truly enjoyed surfing around your blog posts.
In any case I’ll be subscribing to your rss feed and I hope you write again soon!

I am a recovering alcoholic and since a longer time I regularly listen to or read Osho’s teachings. I came across this after googling Osho on alcohol. You sharing this has a tremendous, positive impact on my understanding of my ‘situation’. At first i only saved the picture, because it already resonated with me so much. Having read the text now, i have new hope to able to continue the road of sobriety. Albeit be it one day at a time (I recently had a relapse). I think about sharing it with other people in the AA group that I go to. I’d like to thank you very, very much.